Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, May 1922 · page 25 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #33 — page 25: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains a first-person travel account (not a cartoon) describing Spanish vice industries, likely from the 1920s. The anonymous narrator recounts visiting Barcelona's Paralelo district and Valencia's dance halls, where he observed exploitative conditions: poorly-paid female performers who supplemented meager wages (15 pesetas monthly) through sexual solicitation with patrons in gallery boxes. The text uses cynical, dehumanizing language—comparing Spanish society to "ancient Alexandria and Rome," invoking Aristotle's dismissive categorization of women as animals. The narrator presents casual moral judgment of sex work and female poverty while simultaneously patronizing these establishments. The passage exemplifies the magazine's satirical approach: exposing social hypocrisy and moral corruption through sardonic travel narrative rather than illustrated humor. The crude misogyny and colonial attitude toward Spain reflect period attitudes Captain Billy's typically mocked.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang 23 love are posed and acted with all the cynical callousness of ancient Alexandria and Rome. It is not unusual for a poor girl to go insane, but instead of being sent to an asylum, she is locked in an attic room to suffer and shriek, often startling the revellers below. Here are hag-procuresses who, for 100 pesetas, will bring to their places any girl, rich or poor, whom you may have taken a fancy to on the street. On the *Paralelo* I dropped into a Spanish music hall, with the French name of *Moulin Rouge*, and saw some girls cavort around half-naked on the stage. They shook their bared breasts while the house shook with laughter. In Val- encia dance-halls some are only clothed with a cutaneous eruption. They are only paid about 15 pesetas a month by the management, so after their act they come up into the gallery boxes and make assignations with admirers. The best show is usually in the boxes, not on the stage, where a few extra pesetas, the *bonita* *muchachas* will expose their hidden charms. Such naive animalism, such amiable iniquity leads one to think Aristotle was right when he devoted a chapter to woman in his “History of Animals.” I was not sorry to leave this ex- hibition of galvanized gyrating, which lacked the passionate boldness and voluptuous supple- ness of the dancing of southern Spain. When the sunshine and shadow of Spain are forgotten, one thing will remain. Just be- fore sailing, I tossed a silver coin on the wharf